Symbolism In The Masque Of The Red Death

Throughout his short story, “The Masque of the Red Death,” Poe frequently uses symbolism to illustrate the inevitability of death and human mortality. In the work, Prince Prospero’s kingdom is overtaken by the Red Death, causing him to take his closest and most intimate friends to an abbey, locking them in and the Red Death out. They spend their nights revelling and enjoying themselves; they know if Prince Prospero had not saved them, they would be dead. However, their joy soon comes to an end when the Red Death shows up at Prospero’s masquerade, and the story ends with every last roisterer dead. The Red Death is merely the most of obvious of many symbols for death and its inevitability. Another symbol for death is the clock in the black suite. Every hour, it chimes, and the partygoers cease their merrymaking: “... at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause, momentarily, in their performance, to hearken the sound, and thus the waltzers …show more content…
It is decorated in black and red, two colors that have always had a negative, if not deadly, connotation. Additionally, this room is the only one out of seven that is not entirely monochromatic: “The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue, But in this chamber only, the color of the windows fail to correspond with the decorations. The panes here were scarlet - a deep blood color.” (Poe 4). Because of the choice of colors, the revelers stay out of this room at all costs. Its black decorations are depressing enough, but the red, which is closely associated with the Red Death due to the bloodshed it causes, fills the room and illuminates everything with a macabre blood-colored glow. It is ghastly and fear-inducing, and only the bravest step foot inside the seventh and final